Creative Facilitation
Creative Facilitation is the art of leading a team through a creative process in order to solve problems or generate new shared visions and opportunities for organizations. Getting everyone on the same page in an open and trustful atmosphere of creative collaboration demands special care and attention. Creative Facilitation – TU Delft – Marc Tassoul, 2004
With this special care and attention, I’ll lead you through a creative process, offline or online.
This could be in a wide variety of session types, within the design process. For example:
- Kick-off sessions
- Consumer journeys
- Experience mapping
- Design and development briefing (incl. creating briefings to agencies)
- Idea generation
- Packaging Innovation
- Sustainability
- Concept development
- Concept selection
- and even design Prototyping sessions
- Teambuilding sessions
When is a workshop useful:
- When your challenge is complex or a solution cannot be easily deduced
- When information about your challenge is spread across several people
- When your project can benefit from more buy-in and alignment in the team or organisation
- When many ideas are required or useful
- When you want your team to collaborate in an effective , efficient and creative way to get to new insights
- Or when you face a combination of the above…
The creative synergy of a brainstorming session is very useful in helping a team bind together.
It is often wise to let your brainstorm session be led by an external and independent creative facilitator.
Why a facilitator:
- A facilitator can bring an impartial, ‘outsiders’ perspective
- Leverage a vast toolkit of methods and activities to get you to (creative) outcomes
- Makes sure that the whole group is heard and participates
- Allows stakeholders and whole group to engage in the work and content instead of worrying about the agenda or logistics
- Expert in guiding groups through tough, complex, or politically-charged conversation and discussions
- Guides groups through fuzzy decision points
An effective workshop requires a dedicated approach and thorough preparation.
Online
Due to the current circumstances, I mostly work online with my clients. Although creative sessions online can be challenging there are several ways and tools to make online workshops a great success. Video-conference apps like Zoom and MS Teams introduce more and more features, like breakout rooms, to make online sessions effective. Online tools like Mural are a great alternative for paper whiteboards, with great possibilities for online collaboration and ideation.
It is my role as facilitator to design a tailor-made and interactive online session, to keep participants energized and engaged, and lead a team through the creative process.
Feel free to contact me for more information on creative facilitation in general or my added value in specific.
